Lonnie Holley Biography

Born in 1950 in Jim Crow-era Birmingham, Alabama, as the seventh of 27 children, Holley had a difficult childhood, working from the age of five in various jobs–picking up trash at a drive-in movie theatre, washing dishes, cotton picker, grave digger, short order cook at Disney World. His itinerant childhood, living across the South and in various precarious circumstances, was chaotic, leaving a deep imprint on his work.

A self-taught artist, Holley made his first sculptures when he carved tombstones for nieces who perished in a house fire in 1979. Over the following years, he devoted himself to making sculptures that populated his property near Birmingham, eventually bringing some of his sandstone works to the director of the Birmingham Museum of Art. After his inclusion in the benchmark exhibition Souls Grown Deep: African American Vernacular Art of the South, organised by William Arnett in 1996, Holley's work began to attract attention beyond Alabama. He soon became one of the foremost artists of the Afro-Atlantic aesthetic that blossomed across the Southern United States.

Holley's Birmingham art environment was destroyed in 1997. In 2010, he settled in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives and works today. While he has been making music most of his adult life, his career as a performing artist did not begin until he began professionally recording his music in 2006. Since then, Holley has recorded five studio albums. His latest record, a collaboration with Matthew E. White and entitled Broken Mirror: A Selfie Reflection, was released in early April 2021. Holley has toured the world with various musicians; his ever-evolving compositions and lyrics which are improvised and morph with each concert and recording.

Curated by Alison M. Gingeras, Lonnie Holley: Tangled Up in de Kooning's Fence will be on view at South Etna Montauk's gallery space between May 1 and August 29, 2021. The exhibition coincides with Everything That's Not White, Holley's solo exhibition currently on view at the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill. Both exhibitions will feature a range of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper that Holley made over the course of his residency on the East End.

Lonnie Holley (b. Birmingham, AL, 1950) lives and works in Atlanta, Georgia. His work is represented in the permanent collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY; Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, CA; and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., among many other museums. Selections of his oeuvre have been featured in institutional group exhibitions including at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA (2020); Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY (2018); MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA (2017); de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA (2017); Austin Museum of Art, Austin, TX (2006); Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL (2003); New Orleans Museum of Art, New Orleans, LA (1993); among many others. Holley's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions including Atlanta Contemporary Art Center, Atlanta, GA (2017); Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art; Charleston, SC (2015); Birmingham Museum of Art, Birmingham, AL (2004). Holley has been the subject of several documentary films, and his own directed short film I snuck off the slave ship premiered at Sundance in 2018.

Text courtesy Blum & Poe.